Vox is an American news website run by Vox Media. It was founded by Ezra Klein and launched in April 2014. Its signature feature is the reusable, wiki-like "card stack", which provides context and key definitions related to an article topic.

Contents

1 History

2 Content

3 Reception

4 References

History

Ezra Klein left The Washington Post in January 2014 for a position with Vox Media, the publishers of the sports website SB Nation, technology website The Verge, and video gaming website Polygon. The New York Times described Vox Media as "a technology company that produces media" rather than its inverse, associated with "Old Media". Klein expected to "improve the technology of news" and build an online platform better equipped for making news understandable. The new site''s 20-person staff was chosen for their expertise in topic areas and included Slate ''​s Matthew Yglesias and Klein''s colleagues from The Post.

Vox launched in early April 2014 with Klein as its editor-in-chief. His opening editorial essay, "How politics makes us stupid", explained his distress about political polarization in the context of Yale Law School professor Dan Kahan''s theories on how people protect themselves from information that conflicts with their core beliefs.

Content

In order to reuse prior journalist work, Vox creates "card stacks" in bright "canary yellow" that provide context and define terms within an article. The cards are perpetually maintained as a form of "wiki page written by one person with a little attitude". As an example, a card about the term "insurance exchange" may be reused on stories about the Affordable Care Act.

The site is built on Chorus, a content management system built by Vox Media that lets journalists easily create articles with otherwise complex visual effects and transitions, such as photos that change as the reader scrolls. The demographic associated with Vox Media''s properties are educated households with six-figure incomes and a head of house less than 35 years old.

Reception

The Economist described the site concept as "honourable" and compared Klein''s intentions with John Keats''s negative capability: that Vox can recognize uncertainty without being mired in its details. They connected Klein''s hypothesis—that clear and well-presented information improves deliberative democracy—to Vox ''​s site design, particularly its "explanatory ''cardstacks''". The Economist also added that the essay defeats the purpose of the site, since Vox would have no audience if people were unwilling to hear information that conflicts with their core beliefs.

The New York Times ''​s David Carr associated Klein''s exit for Vox with other "big-name journalists" leaving newspapers for digital start-ups, such as Walter Mossberg and Kara Swisher of Re/code, David Pogue, and Nate Silver.